"It's nice — a fun place to be," said Noah Lusk, 13, who listened quietly to Lozano's 30-minute lesson on guilt and forgiveness of sins before taking his skateboard into the gym.

The ministry in Oklahoma's second-largest city started in 1997 as skateboarding grew in popularity — and as skaters nationwide often were pushed off street corners and town squares.

According to skatereview.com, there are an estimated 16 million skateboarders in the U.S.

"In both North and South America, skate ministry is huge," said Nathaniel Muench, 24, founder of Skaters of Christ Skateboard Ministry and a missionary to Germany, where he's lived the last three years.

"It can look like anything from a guy pulling some ramps and a rail out of his garage every week and opening up his Bible to 10 kids showing up at a skatepark with 15 pizzas and sharing the gospel," said Muench, who works with the global movement Youth With a Mission.

Mike Steincamp, 28, of North Carolina-based MS Skate Ministry, travels year-round to do events and produces gospel tracts and materials such as a 14-day "Landing Bolts" devotional guide — all geared toward skateboarders.

In 1988, John Barnard was an eighth-grade skateboarder who weaved in and out of the teens playing basketball outside a Baptist church in his hometown of Houston.

Then church leaders invited him to skate inside the church gym, and the acceptance he felt changed his outlook on life. He began going to church events, became part of the congregation and dated a minister's daughter, Mandi, whom he married. He became a minister himself.

More than 30 years later, Barnard serves as executive director of Waco, Texas-based Middleman Skateboard Ministries.

After serving for 19 years as a Baptist youth minister, he now works with a team of mentors who go to skateparks across the nation and handing out free skateboards, T-shirts and Bibles with skateboard graphics on the front.

Barnard's goal: to introduce skaters accustomed to being outcasts to a misfit named Jesus.

"I can tell them, 'Christ was a rebel,' " he said. "He went against what so many religious leaders were saying back then.'"

Here in Tulsa, each skater pays $3 per week to cover expenses, such as hiring crews to set up the ramps and equipment in the gym. That process takes an hour before and after each week's session. Skateboarders — or their parents — also must sign liability waiver forms upon entering the building.